Is the Trinity a "Salvation Issue?"

All right, let's get into it.

Let's start with what faith is.

In Christian theology, we often make a distinction between two aspects of faith.

And as is so often the case, we do this using Latin terms because, well, it just sounds cooler.

So the distinction I have in mind here is between what's called fides qua and fides quae.

Pull those words out at your next party to impress your friends.

I doubt they will be impressed, unless they're really cool friends, in which case maybe they will be.

Anyway, we can trace this distinction all the way back to St. Augustine, who lived in the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

For Augustine and the tradition after him, there is both the faith by which we believe, that's fides qua, and the faith which we believe, fides quae.

The first is all about the personal and subjective act of faith.

and it's more or less synonymous with trust.

This is like the faith I have in my wife.

It's a firm sense of trust and confidence in her.

The latter, the faith which we believe, relates to propositions and is objective in the sense that it's about objects of belief.

To return to the marriage example, it would be like the belief that my wife is trustworthy, the belief that she exists, etc.

These could all be formatted as propositions, objects of belief that you can affirm or deny.

Now, the Christian life involves both of these aspects of faith.

We believe in Jesus by faith, trusting him with our lives, and we also believe the faith.

That is, we confess things like the statement, Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead, or the Nicene Creed, or other dogmatic statements which express truths about God and the world.

At this point, we can see that the question of whether any given belief is a salvation issue relates to the fides quae aspect of faith.

That is, such questions relate to the objective content of the faith that we believe.

So the question at hand is whether the Trinity is one of those propositions that are necessary for us to believe in order to be saved.

But before we can really answer that, we must ask whether it really makes any sense that salvation should depend upon believing the right things at all.

For instance, even if we grant that we are saved by grace through faith, as Paul teaches in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9, we still must ask if we are saved by faith in the sense of a firm trust in God, or are we saved by faith in the sense of the things we believe about God? Or is it both? Traditionally, the Christian answer to that question has been the final one.

It's both.